Such technologies produce connectedness without proximity and can emphasize the virtual at the expense of the real. To understand what this might have to do with a boring downtown streetscape, one only has to spend a few minutes standing on any urban street corner. The focus of human
attention has shifted palpably downward into the upturned faces of our phones and away from our physical surroundings. Indeed, this problem has become so acute that at New York’s busiest and most dangerous intersections, transportation planner Janet Sadik-Khan has ordered large, attention-catching graphics to be painted onto the sidewalk to remind distracted pedestrians to look up from their devices to avoid impact with oncoming vehicles.13 Though this new behavior
of ours may seem to be nothing more than a simple change in posture and gaze, it is one that has changed the manner in which we use city streets, and has motivated a change in design. But it is also symptomatic of more profound change: we may no longer care nearly as much about what our surroundings look like because we are not paying attention to them as we used to. In a very real sense, we are no longer there as we used to be, and our physical surroundings are no longer as real as they used to be. The trend toward hybridization of real and virtual spaces in urban
environments also has ideological roots. Indeed, though some are touting the new trends toward wired cities and the Internet of Things
as ushering in the bare beginnings of a new kind of merger between information technologies and architecture, this trend has actually been under way for some time. Just as electronic connectedness enables globalization by discounting the importance of physical space and dimension in many of our everyday dealings with life, the homogenization of architectural design parallels this trend in the arena of bricks, steel, and concrete. Indeed, in their opus S, M, L, XL Rem
Koolhaas and Bruce Mau vaunt empty-box designs in their argument for what they call “the generic city.”14 The authors argue that any kind
of architectural ornament, be it a particular kind of façade design, the idiosyncratic arrangement of streets, or specific elements of cultural
iconography, is destined to be, in some sense, exclusionary.